Technical Field
The embodiments herein are generally related to media monitoring services. The embodiments herein are particularly related to a system and method for monitoring and detecting Television (TV) advertisements (ads) in real-time using content databases. The embodiments herein are more particularly related to a system and method for accurately measuring boundaries, such as start and end time, date of airing, and versions (such as short or long versions) and further of an advertisement in a TV broadcast stream.
Description of the Related Art
The growth of television in the developing world over the last two decades is extraordinary. Television continues to be the largest medium for delivering information in an effective manner to a large captive audience at the right time. Beyond providing entertainment, television vastly increases both the availability of information about the outside world and exposure to other ways of life through advertisements or commercials. Advertisements are a part of daily life and certainly an important part of entertainment programming.
On the other hand, advertisements form an important revenue stream for product owners or companies. Hence, companies or manufacturers have started increasingly spending a larger percentage of their expenses on TV advertisements. When a company buys advertising space or time from a media seller, the company includes specific instructions in regards to when and how the advertisement is broadcasted in TV channels.
In the past half-century, many systems have been developed for monitoring and detecting advertisements from broadcast TV video signals. In the beginning, monitoring is done by human beings where a person visually searches a tape or other records for detecting the advertisements. Later, automated systems are introduced for monitoring and detecting advertisements in real-time. In these systems, initially TV broadcast stream is recorded as an array of long video files. The video files are compared to the specified sample reference video, such as the commercial or advertisements that are to be tracked. When a match between the two video files is detected, the system records the information such as time, date, and TV channel name on which the advertisement is aired and so on. Further, recorded information is provided to the advertisement owners for their reference.
The existing technologies do not ensure accuracy while detecting the ads. As a result, the boundaries (such as start time and end time, date of airing) of the advertisements are not accurately determined in the information extracted from the system. Also, these systems fail to detect an ad when the ad contains silence during its play in the TV channels. For example, the duration of silence in a 20 seconds ad is 14 seconds. When a TV broadcast stream of 10 seconds is compared with this ad sample, the existing systems fail to detect the ad or the detections are fault.
In some cases, companies opt to broadcast an ad in different lengths of contents like long and short versions for effectively generating brand awareness among the audience. For analyzing campaign effectiveness, the version of the ad played is to be identified by the system.
Hence there is a need for a system and method for accurately measuring boundaries (such as start time, end time, date of airing) of the advertisement in a TV broadcast stream. There is also a need for a system and a method for detecting the boundaries of an ad in a TV broadcast stream even when the ad contains silence during its play in the TV channels. There is also a need for a system and a method for identifying the version of an ad played in a TV broadcast stream when the ad has different versions of contents like ads with short length and long length.
The above mentioned shortcomings, disadvantages and problems are addressed herein and which will be understood by reading and studying the following specification.